Kea, there's a saying - quantity has a quality all its own. It originally applied to rather different circumstances than these, of course. Here, it means, you can capture that sense by considering the possible trajectories of that number over time.

Dodger77 wrote:

Drache: I know youre smart but when waffle is around I dunno... he's like the Big Damn Hero and you're he pilot nobody realized was expendable.

What? Like, he shot me down, or I'm just a sidekick, or I got shot down but it doesn't matter because Waffle's here to save the day, or was I a major character until he showed up, or...??

Kit and Waffle : Work out your issues before this topic comes up again maybe?

*embarrassed grin* Oops, I try not to let that side of me come out when I'm here on the Sluggy boards. And I like waffle. It just rubs me the wrong way when people assume that being a person of faith implies ignorance or lack of intelligence and education. Although that may have just been in my perception of waffle's posts, not in their actual content.

Dodger77 wrote:

Drache: I know youre smart but when waffle is around I dunno... he's like the Big Damn Hero and you're he pilot nobody realized was expendable.

You kind of lost me on that one. Waffle's approach was more emotional and bold, but from my point of view, drache's was far more accurate. Sometimes the Big Damn Hero leads you in the wrong direction, and you realize that pilot wasn't actually expendable after all.

Steave wrote:

It's not that I believe there is no Devine being. It's that don't believe there is a Devine being.

I personally associate that kind of passive disbelief more with agnosticism than atheism, but in the interest of not being the outsider dictating to the insider, I'll accept your characterization of that as atheism. There are definitely people, however, who are more hardcore about their atheism than you.

Kea wrote:

To mix philosophical metaphors, doesn't this expose you to a "turtles all the way down" problem? How do you know that the temple of Kulkulkan wasn't an elaborate stage set designed specifically to fool you? How do you know that you're not a brain in a vat hallucinating the whole thing?

Personally, I follow in the Platonic tradition that claims that the material world as we know it is far less real than we perceive it to be, so I'd be in sympathy, for instance, with the description of the world as a mental construct in the mind of God. However, that's a point of view far outside the mainstream of religion, so I don't often seek to defend it. I don't think religious people as a whole should be viewed as necessarily committed to any perspective that extreme.

Steave, I get why faith would need to be positive, but I have no idea why you'd insist that it be an integer.

To be perfectly honest, at that point my mind was more on the last half hour before I got to rush home to share the last night with a special girl before she leaves again for London. It was a poor choice of word. Hopefully the concept remains intact.

Kea, there's a saying - quantity has a quality all its own. It originally applied to rather different circumstances than these, of course. Here, it means, you can capture that sense by considering the possible trajectories of that number over time.

So faith in the unknowable does not have a trajectory that can be affected by evidence, whereas faith in the merely unknown does? I guess I could buy that. But it still feel like it needs to be written in a different font or something, though. I think faith in the merely unknown is more like calculated trust.

It's not that I believe there is no Devine being. It's that don't believe there is a Devine being.

I personally associate that kind of passive disbelief more with agnosticism than atheism, but in the interest of not being the outsider dictating to the insider, I'll accept your characterization of that as atheism. There are definitely people, however, who are more hardcore about their atheism than you.

Once again I don't think you are getting what I am trying to explain. I think you have taken that statement and applied your definition of belief whereas in context I meant that no atheist believes there is no Devine being. Atheists don't believe there is a Devine being. This difference is why I claim that Atheism is not a belief or faith.

Sadly at page ten we're unlikely to ponder this further as I've really enjoyed this discussion.

So faith in the unknowable does not have a trajectory that can be affected by evidence, whereas faith in the merely unknown does? I guess I could buy that. But it still feel like it needs to be written in a different font or something, though. I think faith in the merely unknown is more like calculated trust.

Funny you should say that. There's a particular variable in physics which you write in a different style depending on which dependencies you baked into it (Canonical partition function Z vs the Grand Canonical partition function Z... which is exactly what's up here.

Anyway, I guess the number analogy works best if you're used to thinking about complicated systems numerically so that it doesn't seem flattened.

Kit and Waffle : Work out your issues before this topic comes up again maybe?

*embarrassed grin* Oops, I try not to let that side of me come out when I'm here on the Sluggy boards. And I like waffle. It just rubs me the wrong way when people assume that being a person of faith implies ignorance or lack of intelligence and education. Although that may have just been in my perception of waffle's posts, not in their actual content.

I'm quite fond of you, too. Kitoba.

And yeah, I took a day to cool off there. And I do understand that faith does not equate with ignorance. However, as a twenty five year veteran of online discussions of science, evolution, faith and quackery, my trigger is worn to hair's breadth.

Quote:

Dodger77 wrote:

Drache: I know youre smart but when waffle is around I dunno... he's like the Big Damn Hero and you're he pilot nobody realized was expendable.

You kind of lost me on that one. Waffle's approach was more emotional and bold, but from my point of view, drache's was far more accurate. Sometimes the Big Damn Hero leads you in the wrong direction, and you realize that pilot wasn't actually expendable after all.

drache's points are concise in a way I can't hope to match. I can post a wall of text and throw in footnotes (which I should have done in my last) and still not get the point across as clearly as drache can in a few paragraphs.

And yeah, I took a day to cool off there. And I do understand that faith does not equate with ignorance. However, as a twenty five year veteran of online discussions of science, evolution, faith and quackery, my trigger is worn to hair's breadth.

Would you be interested in a formal debate? I'd like to discuss these issues with more depth, subtly and precision than a typical message board discussion allows. I did one here years ago versus RaahulDaMan, and I think the format was pretty good. I can try to see if I still have a copy of the baseline discussion rules.

And yeah, I took a day to cool off there. And I do understand that faith does not equate with ignorance. However, as a twenty five year veteran of online discussions of science, evolution, faith and quackery, my trigger is worn to hair's breadth.

Would you be interested in a formal debate? I'd like to discuss these issues with more depth, subtly and precision than a typical message board discussion allows. I did one here years ago versus RaahulDaMan, and I think the format was pretty good. I can try to see if I still have a copy of the baseline discussion rules.

My time is still scrambled and will likely be for the foreseeable future. I don't think I can commit to that.

Well, I rather enjoyed the discussion. It was nice for a civil, lengthy debate to happen with many different perspectives. Religion in schools and evolution comes up every now and then in poop, and I've seen it get far less civil. Twas a pleasure to watch.

drache's points are concise in a way I can't hope to match. I can post a wall of text and throw in footnotes (which I should have done in my last) and still not get the point across as clearly as drache can in a few paragraphs.

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